Compression of Medical Sensor Data

Given the prevalence and success of speech, audio, image, and video compression algorithms in consumer electronics, it is surprising that many high-speed digital signal processing (DSP) systems such as wireless infrastructure, radar processing, and medical imaging sensor subsystems have until recently not considered compression as an alternative for reducing data acquisition bandwidth and storage bottlenecks.

The July 2010 “Exploratory DSP” column of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine describes sensor compression for medical transducers, which compress and decompress hundreds or thousands of sensor channels in real time. To learn the benefit of compressing medical sensor data before image reconstruction, read the article by Al Wegener.